Wireless terminals such as cordless telephone systems, wireless LANs, and the like have prevailed remarkably. Such wireless communication system is constituted by a master apparatus and a plurality of slave apparatuses.
In these apparatuses, their ID numbers are registered before they are used, so as not to interfere with other wireless systems. In this case, ID numbers are manually registered between the master and slave apparatuses.
As an example except for a cordless telephone system in which master and slave apparatuses are registered to have one-to-one correspondence, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 7-038960 has proposed a technique that can register a slave apparatus having different IDs in a master apparatus.
Also, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 8-205239 (U.S. Pat. No. 5,802,477) has proposed a technique that can register one slave apparatus in a plurality of master apparatuses.
On the other hand, in a terminal that makes a wireless communication based on Bluetooth that has increasingly received a lot of attention in recent years, since Bluetooth aims at making communications among arbitrary terminals, there is no notion of registration.
However, when Bluetooth terminals are used without registration as in prior art, since a communication starts by transmitting an Inquiry message that an arbitrary terminal can receive, a response message may be received from a wireless terminal to which the user does not want to connect, and the ID number and the like of that wireless terminal may be displayed.
For example, when the user wants to make wireless communications among wireless terminals in a house, a wireless terminal in a neighboring house may receive an Inquiry message, and may send a response message. When a response message is received from a wireless terminal to which the user does not want to connect, and the name and ID number of that terminal are displayed, the operator must determine if a communication can be made with that terminal, thus requiring a complicated procedure. Also, data may be erroneously sent to a wireless terminal in a neighboring house.
On the other hand, the conventional wireless communication system is a 1:n communication system, while a wireless communication system based on Bluetooth is an n:n communication system. For this reason, the number of combinations of communication paths is very large, and it is difficult to manually register for all combinations.